Our memorable story

I can't help thinking of her as an old woman who has taken the elixir of life and changed from an elderly spinster in ankle-length dresses to a bright young thing in mini-skirts!

In earlier times, most youngsters wanting to try their hand at what was known as the 'black art' began as 'printers' devils' on the production side of the business.

With its front page advertisements, single-column headlines and total absence of photographs, the then Haddingtonshire Courier was a pretty dull and unappetising product but still sold about 4,000 copies each week.

No matter what, all court and council stories - the bread and butter of the paper - started with the same introductory paragraph: 'At a sitting of Haddington Sheriff Court - Sheriff KWB Middleton presiding' and so on to a near verbatim report of the sayings of the procurator fiscal and defence solicitor, provosts, town clerks or whoever.

Any kind of imaginative writing was definitely not encouraged!

When I started, taking the job of the late Ken Whitson, on deferred National Service with the Army, I joined an editorial team of two - the Falstaffian figure of James Annand, then editor, and the diminutive chief reporter, Jimmy Harvey. Behind their backs they were known to staff as Little and Large - long before the comedy duo of that name had been heard of.

In those days, 'editorial' was housed in a tiny garret room three floors up in the old Courier building on Market Street where the paper had first been published - 150 years ago this week. My first job of the morning was to light the coal fire in winter.

At that time, the paper had a correspondent in every town and village and handwritten copy flooded in.

On my first day, I was handed a great pile of this to 'sub' - and made the first of many boobs. "This chap can't even spell provost," I said to Mr Harvey; incorrectly changing the perfectly correct spelling to "provist." I still remember his sad little shake of the head!

Both he and James Annand had, by present day standards, fantastic Pitman shorthand.

Annand believed that anyone who couldn't rise to 200 words per minute wasn't worthy of the name reporter and I immediately started lessons with Mary Bruce, widow of deceased Courier editor Charles Bruce.

She was stone deaf but incredibly enthusiastic and lessons often went on until midnight. They took a hefty 7s 6p out of my £2 - 10s a week wage. Night classes in touch typing also had to be paid for out of my own pocket.

I still recall with horror the arrival in the office of the stately figure of James Gray who had started life as a printers' devil in the Courier and went on to become parliamentary correspondent of The Times and later editor and proprietor of papers in South Africa.

He had been brought in as first managing director of D. & J. Croal Ltd., on the death of Miss Evelyne Croal, last member of the founding Croal family to edit the paper.

In coat and bowler hat he marched into editorial and asked how my shorthand speed was coming along. He then began to dictate a section of the Scotsman's financial page at breakneck speed. When I said I would type it back for him he said: "No. Read it. One day you'll be standing in a phone box firing off copy with no time to type up." I was to thank him many times in the years that followed in the national press.

Miss Evelyne's aged mother, however, was still alive and every Christmas threw a staff dinner dance in the George Hotel. A tall, stately woman clad in full-length silver evening dress, she insisted on dancing with every male member of the staff - a terrifying prospect for a fumble-footed lad of 15.

Too young to ride the office motor cycle - a 250cc BSA which had been hammered into the ground by Ken Whitson and others before him - my pedal cycle was my only means of transport apart from the bus.

With town council meetings running on long after the last bus had gone, it was nothing for me to cycle to Prestonpans or Dunbar and back.

And all copy had to be written up that night ready to go to the linotype operators in the morning. Your notebook had to be cleared. Arriving home at two in the morning after a lonely vigil in the office used to drive my mother frantic!

At that time the paper was being printed on a mighty Wharfedale press - hand fed from pre-cut paper.

Known as a 'flat bed' because the lead type from the three linotype machines were locked up in hefty metal frames known as 'chases' and put on the 'bed' of the press which went back and forward under a roller printing one side, it made a great 'whooshing' noise as air buffers ended the charge of the bed.

We started printing on a Tuesday to get the paper on the streets for Thursday night and the last operation was to put the sheets through a hand-fed folding machine comprising many yards of tape which frequently broke and caused a massive pile-up of paper.

Stories were rife of an old printer who, being fond of a drink, used to lie under the machine sewing one tape in, oblivious to the fact that he had a candle burning through the next one. Such characters were not uncommon in the Courier office even years later.

All the headings and many of the advertisements were still hand set in individual letters taken from compartmentalised wooden drawers known as 'cases', and when the paper was printed each letter had to be painstakingly put back in its docket, a process known as 'dissing'.

Covering the various town council meetings also brought young reporters in touch with many characters - especially at Prestonpans, Cockenzie and Port Seton, and East Linton.

At the Pans the town clerk was not infrequently unceremoniously thrown out while Labour Club business was discussed and, at Port Seton, young reporters were pelted with either cigarettes or pandrops by one or other of the councillors.

At East Linton's council, almost every meeting was dominated by cash problems - they were being threatened with big trouble if they didn't build a sewage works.

The redoubtable Provost Miss M.E.N. Aitcheson ruled and the delight of young reporters was to gently prod her two little dogs in the nether regions as they drowsed in front of the gas fire, sending them hurtling round the room, disrupting the usually dull proceedings.

Provost Aitcheson never forgave me for a headline I wrote: 'Crisis in the one horse town' when the council's Clydesdale, responsible for refuse collection, grass cutting and a lot more besides, went down with equine flu and a crisis meeting was called to see if the council could afford to hire in a scaffie wagon from East Lothian County Council.

"You have reduced the dignity of this chamber," she stormed at the next council meeting.

When the fire siren sounded I used to pedal frantically to the fire station at Haddington's The Sands. If I was in time, Firemaster Lee Hogg would let me hang my bike on the handles at the rear of the engine and give me a lift to the fire.

On one occasion, Pishwanton Wood near Gifford had caught fire and I was in the darkened woodland when I was thrown face down in the ashes by a misdirected - or perhaps intentionally directed - fire hose and had to cycle home soaking and filthy.

When I wrote the story up next day, Mr Annand called me in to say there was a mistake in my copy. "What's this Pishwanton Wood?" he demanded. When I showed him an ordnance survey map to prove my point he refused to be moved.

"That word's not going in the Courier," he said. "It's Fishwanton Wood." And so a little bit of the county's history was changed.

When Ken Whitson, a childhood friend who went on to be editor and then managing director of D. & J. Croal, came back from the army, things improved a lot for me. He had a car!

We went out on stories together and more imaginative writing was encouraged. One of my first jobs with him was to cover a terrible crash in which four people died on a level crossing.

Two trains mangled the car and I can still remember the grim spectacle, equalled only by my experiences covering the Lockerbie air disaster many years later for the national press.

Ken and I used to shoot together when I rejoined the Courier as deputy editor years later and I'll never forget going to Macmerry to cover a particularly brutal axe murder on Saturday morning - clad in my plus-twos and deerstalker hat on the morning of a shoot.

"I'm from the Courier," I announced on one doorstep.

"Aye. I didn't think you were fa' the News of the World," came the laconic response.

It was on the second of my three stints on the Courier that the decision was taken to upgrade to a rotary printing press and I went over to Fife with Ken to see the mighty Goss - then an ageing machine but still producing a nice paper.

It was duly installed and a champagne reception for local dignities was held in the machine room for its first run. It was a total disaster. All the photographs turned out jet black.

Ken and I, like most of the staff, were scared to show our faces on the street for days. It took ages to resolve the problem. Heartbreaking after all the work that had gone in to producing a special edition.

Never keen on throwing their money about, the Courier directors bought a machine for casting headings. A chopped down linotype. Then they found out the cost of moving it from Leeds.

In a cash-saving exercise, I set off with two printing engineers for Leeds in a borrowed Land Rover and horse box to dismantle it and bring it north.

The machine parts were covered in potato sacks as the Rover was only taxed for agricultural use. I was also given instructions on how to operate it. Not a good idea.

The first time our compositors used it, a great sheet of molten lead went up in the air and set solid over the machine. They were hours chipping it off and my name was mud! It was known as the Mickey Mouse - and no wonder.

Yet despite problems great and small, not one edition of the paper failed to come out in its 150 years. It survived the Great Strike and even one of Hitler's bombs landing in the linotype room failed to stop it. A fragment of the bomb still hung on the wall when I was a lad.

The staff were a bit like a family, stories of those who had gone before were handed down and many of the reporters trained there went on to make their mark in the national press.

In recent years, however, modern technology, computerisation, and the advent of colour printing made change inevitable.

The cost of a modern printing press and the decline in commercial printing work made the grouping of small independent weekly papers like the Courier impossible to withstand.

Some may mourn the sweeping changes they have seen; I, for one, do not.

Like the county itself, change had to come if the paper was to go on, as I believe it will, for many more years, despite the advent of the internet and other news sources.

There will always be a place for good local news, and papers that can train up fine reporters to go on and make their name in the wider world.

By Ian Metcalfe, former Courier deputy editor